Sorry for randomly bumping this thread, but just how good is Whatever People Say I Am...? For a long time I found the album to be way overrated. It had some fun songs but I didn't understand how it could be considered a modern classic by many people. Now though, I think it's absolutely fantastic and it has overtaken Humbug as my favorite AM record. Come to think of it, my experience with this album is very similar to my experience with Is This It. I always place both those albums in the same category for some reason.

Now back to Whatever. Alex Turner was 20 I think when it was released and he could already right some fantastic lyrics. They're actually better than his newer lyrics for me. I'm about the same age as Turner was when it was released. Stuff like that always scares the shit out of me! But I wanted to say that the lyrics are just extremely funny, and more importantly relatable. I don't know any other album that has such good lyrics about going out and drinking and girls and stuff like that. If you know an album with lyrics like that, please recommend it to me by the way. My favorite set of lyrics is probably this part in Dancing Shoes:

And the shit, shock, horror
You've seen your future bride
Oh, but it's oh so absurd
For you to say the first word
So you're waiting and waiting

It's a pretty good description of me at basically every party. Anyway, the music is great as well of course. Every song is simply very catchy and fun. Whenever I want to get pumped up I just put this album on. It never disappoints.

Sorry for randomly bumping this thread, but just how good is Whatever People Say I Am...? For a long time I found the album to be way overrated. It had some fun songs but I didn't understand how it could be considered a modern classic by many people. Now though, I think it's absolutely fantastic and it has overtaken Humbug as my favorite AM record. Come to think of it, my experience with this album is very similar to my experience with Is This It. I always place both those albums in the same category for some reason.

Now back to Whatever. Alex Turner was 20 I think when it was released and he could already right some fantastic lyrics. They're actually better than his newer lyrics for me. I'm about the same age as Turner was when it was released. Stuff like that always scares the shit out of me! But I wanted to say that the lyrics are just extremely funny, and more importantly relatable. I don't know any other album that has such good lyrics about going out and drinking and girls and stuff like that. If you know an album with lyrics like that, please recommend it to me by the way. My favorite set of lyrics is probably this part in Dancing Shoes:

And the shit, shock, horror
You've seen your future bride
Oh, but it's oh so absurd
For you to say the first word
So you're waiting and waiting

It's a pretty good description of me at basically every party. Anyway, the music is great as well of course. Every song is simply very catchy and fun. Whenever I want to get pumped up I just put this album on. It never disappoints.

It does so perfectly captures the essence of what it is for a single, twenty year old bloke on the town one night.

Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured is so endearingly innocuous. It's just a standard night out, with references to something as meaningless as requesting a route to the cabbie when catching a taxi home.

I kind of default consider that Suck it and See is my favourite album, but whenever I listen back to Whatever... I just find it so incredibly clever, relatable and hilarious that's it hard to not prefer it over their following albums.

Oooh... this is tough. 1 and 2 are super close for me. I love the grunginess of Humbug which contains two of my absolute favorite songs of theirs, Cornerstone and Crying Lightning. AM is their most polished album and it was amazing to see how much it connected with American audiences, to the point that the AM songs (not just the singles) they played got by far the biggest crowd reactions at the shows I saw. It was something I'd never seen before at a show.

It's also fascinating to see how disparate people's answers on this are.